Other views: Market, but don't mandate, smart guns

In the James Bond movie Skyfall, a bad guy takes 007's handgun away from him and tries to shoot him with it. But because the gun is designed to fire only when it recognizes Bond's palm print, it won't work. Bond escapes, and the bad guy gets eaten by a Komodo dragon.

Aside from the dragon business, this is no longer just fiction. The first commercially available "smart" gun, now on sale in California, won't fire unless the shooter is wearing a special watch linked to the weapon via radio waves.

Other emerging technologies would allow guns to fire only if their owners (or approved users) were wearing a special ring or bracelet, if the gun recognized their fingerprint or their grip, or even if a chip were embedded under the shooter's skin.

Smart guns have long been the dream of gun-safety advocates, and for good reason. If they were everywhere, they could reduce accidental shooting deaths of children and make it less worthwhile for a thief to steal a gun.

So the question isn't whether smart guns make sense; for some people, particularly parents of young children, they surely do. It's whether government should mandate that all handguns be smart, as at least two proposals in Congress and an existing New Jersey law would do.

That's a much less persuasive idea. A closer look suggests smart guns aren't ready for widespread use, and premature mandates would provoke a backlash that would set back their acceptance.

For now, they're far more expensive than regular guns. The personalized handgun that went on sale recently in California costs $1,800, at least three times pricier than popular Glock handguns.

Reliability is also a question mark. A Justice Department report last year noted that gun maker Colt found the two prototypes it made in the 1990s to be unreliable, while Smith & Wesson had trouble "reliably integrating the electronics into the firearm."

Even if smart guns were reliable, cheap and widely used, they might not dramatically reduce gun violence. While statistics are murky, the great majority of the nation's 30,000 shooting deaths every year appear to be by gun owners themselves. That includes suicides, domestic and workplace disputes, and nearly all the worst recent mass shootings.

Moreover, mass shooters often use semi-automatic rifles or shotguns, and the congressional proposals would apply only to handguns. Many accidental child shootings are with "long" guns.

Perhaps the worst idea in the proposals is to make gun owners return millions of existing handguns to manufacturers to have them retrofitted, a logistical nightmare that would provoke broad disobedience.

There are already simpler ways to save lives than a federal smart-gun mandate. Parents could start by using gun locks and securing weapons where children can't get them. The Obama administration could deliver the public service spots on gun safety that it has talked about but never pushed.

At least for now, it makes more sense to market smart guns to people who really want them than to mandate them for all.

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Other views: Market, but don't mandate, smart guns

In the James Bond movie Skyfall, a bad guy takes 007's handgun away from him and tries to shoot him with it. But because the gun is designed to fire only when it recognizes Bond's palm print, it

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